The Corisco Conspiracy

The Corisco Conspiracy is the story of the Gunpowder Plot (the “conspiracy” of the title) as related, in crystal-clear prose, by William Shakespeare. It has long been suspected that the Shakespeares of Stratford-upon-Avon were crypto-Catholics. In this tell-all memoir, William, the first son of John and Mary Shakespeare, not only authenticates that suspicion, but also reveals significant events that happened in the Catholic underground of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

The most noteworthy of those events is the first meeting of the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot. It took place in Corisco, an island in present-day Equatorial Guinea which figures prominently in Shakespeare’s narrative. That was in November 1585 – twenty years before the plotters’ historic gunfight with security officers in Staffordshire.

Corisco was not Shakespeare’s only link to Africa. Some of his fellow “Jesuit messengers” were Afro-Europeans. He himself wrote only one of the plays for which he is famous. The rest were supplied to his acting troupe by a different spy: a Portuguese-African princess, who was instructed to write in them encoded messages for Roman Catholic theatre-goers. The Bard married twice. His second wife, the hitherto unidentified Dark Lady of the Sonnets, was a Muslim from the Kingdom of Malabo. So, he embraced Mohammedanism. His confidants, a London couple of Malian descent, were also Islamic members of the Church of Rome.

Many more Catholic rebels were implicated in the Gunpowder Plot than have thus far been listed in history books. Shakespeare does justice to them all in his account.